Focus magazine said an analysis by German security services showed Merkel’s calls were listened into by even more people than initially thought.

It said analysis by German security services showed the four countries, and not just the US, were eavesdropping.

The British Embassy in Berlin declined to comment on the allegations.

Relations between Germany and the US have turned chilly since it was alleged that its National Security Agency (NSA) has been tapping Merkel’s phone, possibly from a listening station on top of the US embassy which is just a few hundred metres away from the Chancellor’s office in the centre of Berlin.

Focus, meanwhile, also reported that as well as targeting Merkel’s phone, Russian spies were particularly active in Germany with 120 agents operating in the country.

US officials arrived in Berlin on Monday to meet the German foreign minister over the NSA spying scandal.

One of the officials said the United States was taking German outcry over revelations of American spying on Europeans seriously, ahead of his visit to soothe frazzled ties.

Congressman Gregory Meeks told Handelsblatt newspaper that US-German relations were “of enormous importance” and must be stronger and closer still.

“We want the Germans to know that we don’t take their anger lightly,” Meeks said in comments reported in German and made before his trip together with Senator Chris Murphy, who chairs the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on European Affairs.

They were scheduled to meet the German foreign and interior ministers on Monday before heading to Brussels on Tuesday.

Germans have reacted angrily to revelations that emails, phone calls, web searches and other data may have been hoovered up by US intelligence agents, as part of widespread espionage that has also strained Washington’s ties with other partners.

After meeting the US delegation Monday, Thomas Oppermann, the Social Democrats’ parliamentary group leader and chairman of the secret service oversight committee, said the US espionage affair was “not over”.

“We expect further light to be shed,” he said, adding there had been agreement between the parties “that the completely out-of-hand practice of bugging by the NSA must finally have limits”.

Merkel called in parliament last week for answers over “grave” US spying accusations which, she said, were testing transatlantic ties, including fledgling US-EU trade talks.

“We understand the German fears,” Meeks said, adding that US President Barack Obama was also “very concerned”.

“For this reason he’s having checked which secret service methods are reasonable and which are not,” he added.

What’s More Important: Security or Freedom?

So National Security Agency Director Keith B. Alexander, who, along with his boss, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., thinks that “if you can collect it, you should collect it,” now is asking whether it might not be such a good idea in the case of spying on the citizens of US allies like Germany, France, Spain et al.

“What’s more important,” the chief spook reportedly asked, following revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA has been spying on the electronic communications and phone conversations of millions of people in European other countries around the world. “Partnering with countries may be more important than collecting on them.”

This unusual moment of reflection came before the later disclosure that the Alexander’s super spying outfit was also tapping the cell phones of the leaders of America’s major allies, including France and Germany, not to mention Brazil.

Caught with his electronic pants down, Alexander, who is also a four-star active-duty general, is suddenly acknowledging that spying might have a downside.

In this case, the downside he is acknowledging is a diplomatic one: if you spy on the people — and the leaders — of a friendly state, violating a basic trust that had been taken for granted, you risk losing that trust and losing a long-time friend. Alliances can founder over such abuses of trust.

What Alexander and his truth-challenged boss Clapper are not considering, though, is whether there is also a bigger question: Isn’t maintaining democratic freedoms and the trust of the American people more important than collecting every possible datum of information about them, and monitoring their every move and every communication?”

The answer, of course, is obvious, which is why Alexander and Clapper are not asking it.

People in Europe are growing increasingly incensed that the US is “hoovering up” their communications, storing them, and picking through them with mega computers that hunt for key words. But people in the US are growing increasingly angry that the NSA is doing the same thing here at home.

And just as this outrageous international electronic eavesdropping is destroying America’s image abroad and threatening long-held alliances, it is destroying American democracy, and public faith in the Bill of Rights, right here at home.

Not that Alexander and Clapper care. They don’t answer to the American people. They work for the US government, and the government these days — the president, the Congress and the Supreme Court — is clearly not “of, by and for” the people. It is of, by and for the corporations and the elite, and that oligarchic power elite, having stolen the country blind over the past several decades, is getting worried that the public is starting to wake up to, and grow restive about it.

The ruling elite wants an all-seeing NSA to keep the public in check, and to enable it to spot, and then to crush, any outbreak of rebellion, as was done so effectively to the Occupy Movement in the autumn of 2011.

It’s probably fair to say that the crushing of Occupy was the first battle of the second American revolution. Looking back someday, it will also probably be recognized as the trial run of the NSA security net.

We can’t expect much from Congress at this point. These are the same pathetic and fearful “representatives of the people” who gave a shameless standing ovation recently to the Secret Service and Capitol Police thugs who “protected them” by gunning down an unarmed and mentally disturbed young mother who had panicked, driving her car erratically in the vicinity of the White House and the Capitol building.

The people of New York City just told New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg what they thought of his paramilitary NYPD response to the Occupy Movement and his years of coddling the wealthy in that pre-eminent American metropolis, replacing him with a progressive new mayor, Bill de Blasio, who has vowed to attack the city’s huge income divide, starting with a surtax on incomes of $500,000 or more to help pay for cancelled public kindergarden programs, and who has said he wants to put a stop to the police department’s widely loathed stop-and-frisk program, which has effectively criminalized a whole generation of young blacks and latinos.

The rest of the country may be just behind New Yorkers.

A good start would be demanding the sacking of Alexander and Clapper, two men whose fascistic policies and philosophies are antithetical to freedom and democracy. That should be followed by a national campaign to oust any and all politicians who do not stand four-square for a robust defense of all the articles of the Bill of Rights.

Gen. Alexander may not be asking, “What’s more important: defending freedom or collecting information on all the nation’s citizens?” but the American people already know the answer.

Foiled plots and bathtub falls

ANY sane public discussion of the government surveillance brought to light by Edward Snowden’s leaks must eventually get around to discussing the costs and benefits of the current practices of America’s intelligence agencies. Of course, this discussion is presently impossible, since Americans are not allowed to know what these practices are. We are therefore stuck having to listen to enormously powerful, secretive, professionally dissembling people who are very possibly violating Americans’ constitutional rights en masse assure us that they are in fact making James Madison proud, and that, in any case, we really ought to be terribly grateful for their unheralded toil, as the completely untroubling spy-craft about which Americans absolutely cannot know has thwarted multiple terrorist attacks, saving an untold number of lives. I don’t want to die. Do you?On the other side of the equation, we have Edward Snowden himself, who expressed his scepticism earlier today in an online chat:

Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to acheive that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we’ve been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.

If gutting the fourth amendment would forever put an end to bathtub tragedies, would you favour it? Last week, Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic made a similar argument at length:

Of course we should dedicate significant resources and effort to stopping terrorism. But consider some hard facts. In 2001, the year when America suffered an unprecedented terrorist attack—by far the biggest in its history—roughly 3,000 people died from terrorism in the U.S.

That’s what things looked like at the all-time peak for deaths by terrorism. Now let’s take a longer view. We’ll choose an interval that still includes the biggest terrorist attack in American history: 1999 to 2010.

Again, terrorists killed roughly 3,000 people in the United States. And in that interval,

roughly 360,000 were killed by guns (actually, the figure the CDC gives is 364,483—in other words, by rounding, I just elided more gun deaths than there were total terrorism deaths).

roughly 150,000 were killed in drunk-driving accidents.

The thrust of this argument is simple: terrorism is such a minor threat to American life and limb that it’s simply bizarre—just stupefyingly irrational and intellectually unserious—to suppose that it could even begin to justify the abolition of privacy rights as they have been traditionally understood in favour of the installation of a panoptic surveillance state. Would Americans give up their second-amendment rights if it were to save 3000 lives? Well, it would, but we won’t. Surely the re-abolition of alchohol would save more than 3000 lives, but we’re not about to discuss it. Why not? Because liberty is important to us and we won’t sell it cheaply. Why should we feel differently about our precious fourth-amendment rights?

This argument seems somehow glib, doesn’t it? Why is that? This is a profoundly interesting and important question, because the argument is in fact perfectly sound, and the fate of American liberty may depend on wider recognition that this is so. That so many of us find this argument somehow silly and immaterial surely has something to do with the way terrorism (whatever that is) rattles our sense of safety far beyond reason. But why does it do that? Because it injures our national pride, and Americans are too insecure to countence that sort of insult against ego? Because we are in the grip of deep-seated but erroneous belief that hegemony buys total security? It’s a bit mysterious to me. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that certain people benefit enormously from an irrational fear of terrorism.

If you haven’t heard of him by now, Keith Alexander is a four-star Army general, director of the National Security Agency, chief of the Central Security Service, and commander of the United States Cyber Command. “As such, he has his own secret military, presiding over the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the 24th Air Force, and the Second Army”, adds James Bamford in in an extremely useful Wired profile. Who knew of the semi-independent Keith Alexander branch of government? I didn’t. Anyway, Mr Alexander is reportedly set to “release details of cases where the programs have stopped a terrorist attack”. As CNN reports, “Over the weekend a three-page document on the NSA programs was released to congressional intelligence committees and states the plots were thwarted in the United States and more than 20 other countries”.

It’s touching to hear that the NSA is concerned with the welfare of people in other countries, but what will this really come to? How many American lives have actually been saved specifically by the programmes in question? What do these programmes actually involve? I feel sure Mr Alexander is not about to imperil his omnipotence by giving us the straight scoop. Certainly, it would be incredibly naive to trust the man.

Suppose the CEO of Exxon were to promise us that there are absolutely no adverse environmental effects of fracking? On the contrary; it’s great for the environment! Would you believe him? Now, suppose it were illegal for anyone not specifically authorised by Exxon to publish any details about how fracking works, or about fracking’s effects. You would be a fool to trust him, wouldn’t you? I don’t see why Mr Alexander’s grudging disclosures merit more credence.

If it weren’t for the monumental credulity of America’s spy-loving public, the NSA might find itself in a bit of bind. Acts of terror against Americans are by all known accounts exceedingly rare and, as we have seen, they pose relatively little real danger to public safety. If the NSA actually has foiled more than a few serious, terrorist plots against Americans in the past decade or so, saving more lives than are lost through bathtub falls, then we must ask why terrorist plots have become so much more common since the inception of the “war on terror”? If they have become more common, we’ll need to ask whether the war on terror itself helps explains this increase in terrorist conspiracy. If it turns out that America’s security apparatus is thwarting plots that it is itself through its other activities inspiring, a long, detailed list of authentic, thwarted plots may tell us only that America’s overweening security apparatus has so far successfully neutralised its own predictable dangers. This sort of “security” can’t justify the loss of even a little liberty. So, even if it were not foolish to trust Mr Alexander, the revelation of heretofore unknown foiled plots tells us little of real use about the costs and benefits of the NSA’s unprecedentedly comprehensive snooping. Only much greater transparency can possibly serve the needs of a substantive democratic discussion. If the only conclusion the public will be allowed to entertain is that it’s all worth it, then the public’s verdict cannot in the end confer real moral legitimacy on the dubious activities of Mr Alexander’s covert minions.

P.S. Seeing as how the NSA searches through popular cloud services such as Google, iCloud, etc. why not switch to a cloud provider that is under the radar? Just click the banner at the top-right and give the middle finger to those trying to watch you